Pennsylvania universities may scrap uniform gun policy

Pittsburgh >> The agency that oversees Pennsylvania's state-owned universities might scrap a plan to institute a uniform weapons policy at all 14 campuses, its leader said.

The system could instead allow individual schools to set their own weapons policies, Frank Brogan, chancellor of the State System of Higher Education, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

The system's board of governors had planned to vote on a draft policy in January, but the vote was postponed to allow for additional study. Brogan said then that it would be a challenge to establish a single policy in part because the national legal landscape is in flux.

Brogan told the newspaper the policy is still under review and may yet yield a system-wide approach.

The existing proposal would ban weapons in campus buildings and at sporting events, outdoor class meetings and assemblies. Guns generally would be allowed in outdoor areas and in parked cars.

Some critics, including the faculty union, have called for an outright weapons ban, while gun rights supporters said the proposal went too far and would endanger safety.

The issue came to the forefront last year after it emerged that several state-owned universities were allowing guns on campus after the state's lawyers concluded that an outright ban on weapons was likely unconstitutional. Students with concealed-carry permits had questioned the constitutionality of blanket weapons bans at state-owned universities, prompting a legal review that found such bans were vulnerable to court challenge.

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The system subsequently told all 14 member schools to hold off on weapons policy changes until a task force on campus safety could weigh in.

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